Reading
Taking twenty minutes to take down some notes and reactions to this morning’s reading.
Interdisciplinary Science Meeting
Great post by the AAAS on theScience on FIRE meeting. Think the focus on young faculty and undergraduate education is dead on. However , the lack of emphasis (or even inclusion) of ecology and evolution material in “exemplar programs” such as CIMB (not be confused with UC Davis’s CLIMB, which does this balance very well) is tragic, given that (a) these fields have a richer and longer quantitative history than mol bio, (b) undergraduate ed in these areas shares the same general lack of emphasis in computation and mathematics skills as it’s molecular brethren classes (c) world challenges in these areas are at least on par with challenges in medicine, and deserve attention (despite the differences in funding).
Science Communication
There’s been a long and rather lively thread on EcoLog discussing communication with the public; which I’ve mostly ignored, but decided to skim a bit of today after hitting on the tension between scientific accuracy and effective communication in our GTC seminar yesterday. One post that got my attention pointed to Randy Olson, in an NY Times interview(complete with skype/index-card presentation video), arguing that figuring out the right way to communicate climate change is going to require taking risks and making mistakes, not sticking to tried and largely unsuccessful strategies.
While this message resonated, his accompanying essay emphasizing “stop being a scientist” and learning to appeal to emotion and instinct did not. The reply from Steve McIntyre on the need to address niche audiences (politicians, lawyers, economists) rather than the vaunted “general public” seems dead-on. Of course to some extent I disagree with both – we need a scientific approach based on measuring what works and what doesn’t work in communicating, not a “scientific-sounding” approach that Randy lampoons. Steve’s vision of an “engineering” approach to create a 2000 page document that looks/smells familiar to other professionals is no more convincing than the “science paper” approach.
Yes we need to pitch to specialists, yes we need innovation, but we can certainly be scientific about it. Can we go beyond strategies based on antecdotes to strategies based on data measuring their success? Successful researchers aren’t conservative in experiments. We should be able to do the same here.
Social media in science
Along the lines of communication, another debateabout talking vs doing science, in reference to the use of social media. Both are as crucial as they are inseparable. Science Online had a whole track on tools aimed at doing science, and remains a hub people implementing, learning, and using these methods. I agree, this is the track I’m most excited about too. Let’s get more of it.
Another Open Notebook, this one by colleague Lee Worden.